MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 13 of 100

Correct — option (3), Akbar. All four printed statements describe measures of Akbar's reign, and taken together they describe no other Mughal. Statement i, the separation of religion from politics, is the substance of sulh-i-kul, the doctrine of peace with all that governed his later policy: he abolished the pilgrimage tax in 1563 and the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims, in 1564, opened the Ibadat Khana at Fatehpur Sikri in 1575 to debate among scholars of every faith, admitted Rajputs to the highest ranks of the nobility, and detached office and revenue from religious affiliation. Statement iv is the mahzar of 1579, the declaration by which the leading ulema accepted that where the jurists differed on a disputed question, the emperor's decision should prevail — a claim to be the final authority in religious and social law, and the sharpest expression of what statement i describes in general terms. Statements ii and iii belong to his social regulations. Akbar restrained the practice of sati, forbidding the compulsion of a widow and requiring his officers to intervene where force was used, and Abul Fazl records the emperor himself riding to prevent one such burning; and his regulations set a minimum age for marriage, discouraging the marriage of children, while widow remarriage was permitted rather than condemned. The English of statements ii and iii is awkwardly translated — statement iii in particular reads as a broken sentence — but their subject matter is unmistakable. No other name in the options can carry even two of these four, so the answer is Akbar.

• (1)Babur — Babur's Indian reign lasted from 1526 to 1530, four years spent almost entirely in fighting: Panipat against Ibrahim Lodi in 1526, Khanwa against Rana Sanga in 1527, Chanderi in 1528 and the Ghaghra against the Afghans in 1529. He left a remarkable book, the Baburnama, written in Chagatai Turkish, with its observations on the plants, animals and manners of Hindustan, but he left no social legislation, no religious settlement and no administrative structure — those were the work of his grandson. A candidate who picks Babur has usually recognised that the statements sound like an innovator's programme without asking whether the reign in question was long enough for one.
• (2)Humayun — Humayun ruled from 1530 to 1540 and again from 1555 to 1556, and the interval tells the story: he was driven out of India by Sher Shah Suri after Chausa in 1539 and Kannauj in 1540, spent years in exile in Persia, and recovered Delhi only months before his death from a fall on the steps of his library. His reign is remembered for military reverses, for the administrative debt the Mughals owed to Sher Shah's interlude, and for the Persian artists he brought back with him. It contains nothing resembling a policy on sati, on the age of marriage or on the emperor's authority in disputed law, and a candidate choosing him is answering from dynastic order rather than from the content of the statements.
• (4)Aurangzeb — Aurangzeb is the exact opposite of statement i, which is what makes him the instructive wrong answer. He reimposed the jizya on non-Muslims in 1679, some hundred and fifteen years after Akbar abolished it, discouraged music at court, sponsored the compilation of the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri as a digest of Hanafi law, and made orthodoxy rather than sulh-i-kul the declared basis of the state. A ruler who governs by the sharia as expounded by the jurists cannot at the same time claim, as the mahzar allowed Akbar to claim, that his own decision overrides theirs. This option catches the candidate who registers only that the statements concern religion and social custom, without noticing which way each of them points.

Akbar's reign is asked about as a set of dated measures, and they fall into three groups. The first is fiscal and religious: the abolition of the pilgrimage tax in 1563 and of the jizya in 1564, both of which removed a legal disability from non-Muslims and made revenue policy indifferent to faith. The second is institutional: the Ibadat Khana at Fatehpur Sikri from 1575, where scholars of many religions disputed in his presence; the mahzar of 1579, by which the leading ulema conceded that the emperor's ruling should prevail on questions where jurists differed; and the Din-i-Ilahi of 1582, a small circle of disciples rather than a religion in any ordinary sense. The third is social: restraint on sati so that no widow could be compelled, discouragement of child marriage through a minimum age, and permission for widows to remarry. Behind all three lies sulh-i-kul, peace with all, and behind that a political calculation — a Turkish-Persian dynasty ruling an overwhelmingly non-Muslim population could not afford a state defined by one community. The alliance with the Rajputs, sealed by marriage and by high mansabs, is the same policy in another form.

MPSC's medieval-history questions are largely about attaching measures to rulers, and Akbar attracts the largest share of them because his reign contains the most measures to attach. The description format used here — a list of statements with the name withheld — is answered by finding the statement that only one ruler can satisfy, and in a Mughal question the sharpest such statement is almost always the one about religious policy, because the dynasty's rulers differed on it so plainly. Statement iv is the discriminator here: a claim to be the final authority in disputed law belongs to Akbar's mahzar and to nothing else in Mughal history. The Commission also tends to print translated statements in awkward English, as it does with statements ii and iii, so the candidate must read for subject matter rather than for grammar; a statement that reads badly is not thereby a false statement. Finally, it is worth carrying the four Mughal names in the options as a contrast set, since Akbar and Aurangzeb are so often offered together precisely because their religious policies run in opposite directions.

• Akbar abolished the pilgrimage tax in 1563 and the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims, in 1564, detaching fiscal and official status from religious affiliation under the doctrine of sulh-i-kul, peace with all.
• The mahzar of 1579 secured the leading ulema's acceptance that where jurists differed on a disputed question the emperor's decision should prevail — the claim described in statement iv.
• Akbar restrained sati, forbidding any compulsion of a widow and requiring his officers to intervene where force was used, an intervention of his own being recorded by Abul Fazl.
• His regulations set a minimum age for marriage and discouraged the marriage of children, while widow remarriage was permitted rather than condemned.
• Aurangzeb reversed the religious settlement, reimposing the jizya in 1679 and sponsoring the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri, which is why he is the standard contrast offered against Akbar in option sets.

• Choosing Aurangzeb because the statements are about religion and social custom, without noticing that statement i describes the separation of the two and he did the reverse
• Reading a badly translated statement as a false statement; statements ii and iii are awkward English but describe real Akbari regulations
• Attributing the claim to final authority in disputed law to some general notion of Mughal despotism rather than to the specific mahzar of 1579
• Answering from dynastic sequence rather than from content, which is how Babur and Humayun get chosen for measures neither reign had time to enact

The Mughals reach MPSC papers chiefly as policy-attribution questions: which ruler abolished or imposed a tax, which ruler issued a particular decree, which ruler's reign saw a named institution, and which statements about a reign are correct. Akbar and Aurangzeb are placed together in option sets more often than any other pair, because a candidate who knows only that both had strong religious policies cannot separate them, while one who knows the direction of each can answer instantly. Expect the description format, in which the ruler must be inferred from a list of measures, and expect the statements to be translations from Marathi, so their English may be strained. Dates are worth carrying for the half-dozen most quoted measures, since the Commission sometimes converts the same material into a chronological question.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The mahzar or declaration of 1579, by which the emperor's ruling was to prevail on questions where Muslim jurists differed, belongs to the reign of which ruler ?

  • (a)Humayun
  • (b)Akbar
  • (c)Jahangir
  • (d)Aurangzeb

  Answer(b) Akbar — the mahzar was signed by the leading ulema in 1579 and gave the emperor the last word in disputed questions of law, which is why it is often loosely called the infallibility decree. It is the sharpest single expression of Akbar's claim to authority over religious and social law, and it stands in complete contrast to Aurangzeb's later reliance on the jurists and on the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The jizya was abolished by Akbar in 1564 and reimposed by which later Mughal emperor, and in which year ?

  • (a)Jahangir, in 1610
  • (b)Shah Jahan, in 1633
  • (c)Aurangzeb, in 1679
  • (d)Bahadur Shah I, in 1707

  Answer(c) Aurangzeb, in 1679 — the reimposition of the tax on non-Muslims reversed one of the founding measures of Akbar's religious settlement and is the standard marker of the change in Mughal policy. Together with the abolition of the pilgrimage tax in 1563, Akbar's 1564 measure is the usual pair asked about in questions on his religious policy.